Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

“You still have the brooch, haven’t you?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “Let go my arm.”

He let her go. “Now fetch the brooch.”

“I’m not sure if I can find it,” she muttered, watching his face.

“You’d better find it. The police will want to see it. I don’t know why you kept it. That’s not my business. Perhaps you just wanted an expensive-looking brooch.”

“It’s not true. It’s simply not true. I was going to give it back, then Jackie went away and everything happened and I forgot.”

“Now you’ve remembered. Go and get it.” He was quite offensively uninterested in her explanations. He treated her simply as a nonentity with an interesting brooch. “You’ll have to get it sooner or later. The police will make you.”

“The police would never bully me like this,” she said angrily. “They have better manners. I’ll go and look for the brooch. If I throw it out of the window, that’s my business.”

“And if the police throw you in Borstal or approved school that’s your business too. Come on. So far as I’m concerned, you forgot about the brooch and you’ve just remembered it.” Prudence went sullenly from the room.

Marryatt picked up the tray and took it to the sitting-room, where Hester and her father sat in the kind of exhausted silence that might overtake people who have drifted too long alone, helpless, in a lifeboat in an empty ocean.

He poured the tea and offered it to both of them. Wade tasted it, and put the cup down heavily.

“It’s cold,” he said, with the painful resignation of a man almost totally inured to misfortune.

INSPECTOR LEWIS and Sergeant Young looked particularly out of place on the chintz sofa where they now sat side by side, menacing but professionally uncomfortable, like bailiffs.

“This fishing,” Lewis said. “Everything else is fixed now, it’s only the fishing. We’ve worked out the rest, you see, we’ll get to that in a minute, but if we can’t get something out of the fishing we can’t see the end of this at all. If one of those bus conductors, one of those railwaymen, would stop telling us it’s August and the place is full of strangers and how can they be expected etcetera, we might get somewhere, but it’s like asking a slot machine to identify a penny. So it’s back to the fishing. Now this old man Smith who was drinking bitter with his mind on the stars and talking about how they might have been fishing in Ceylon or they might not, I told you he kept bringing astrology into it. We haven’t any inside knowledge to explain this. You people, who knew all the men well, absolutely must try again. Did you ever hear any of those men who were to fly to Dublin discuss astrology?”

Hester looked at her father hopelessly, and shook her head. She was about to speak, when suddenly an expression of the deepest concentration, followed almost instantly by doubt and irresolution, crossed her face. She was like a novice playing chess, who sees a good move and realises almost at once that it may be a bad one.

“I had an idea,” she said weakly, “then it went away. But I have thought of something. Wherever this fishing happened, if it took place last season, it can’t have been in Ceylon. I knew that was ridiculous. Morgan, Maurice, Uncle Joe – none of them has been out of England for at least a year. And I don’t believe people go fishing in Ceylon anyway.”

“Except the people who have to earn their living by it,” Marryatt said.

Wade looked up, and smiled faintly at his daughter.

“Don’t forget the pearl-fishers,” he said. “Bizet.” He relapsed into his private agony.

“Bizet?” Lewis turned on Sergeant Young. “Have you ever heard of Bizet, Sergeant?”

“Sir, he wrote Carmen. Tor – eee – a – dor. You know. And an opera called The Pearl-Fishers. I haven’t heard it.”

“Yes,” Hester said. “That’s it. Oh, I nearly had it before, when you were talking about astrology. It has to be The Pearl-Fishers. The hero’s called Nadir, that’s your astrological term, and he falls in love with a priestess and goes away for five years and comes back and he finds she saved his life when she was a child – or was that his friend? Yes, it must have been. The friend is the chief and the other two are going to be burnt and the friend lets them escape and is burnt on the pyre instead. Why, we have some records here, if you want.”

Lewis shook his head. “It sounds very confused,” he said guardedly. “Opera is not my subject.”

“When did you see this opera?” Sergeant Young asked quickly.

“I think it was Sadler’s Wells. Covent Garden has never done it, or not for a long time. I went with – with Maurice.”

“At the beginning of last season?” Young asked, knowing the answer.

“Yes. A lot of people went, because it was the first chance they’d had to hear it. Maurice liked it more than I did.”

“Ceylon?” Lewis said impatiently. “Where does Ceylon come in?”

“It’s set in Ceylon.”

“And Maurice Reid liked it. So he was the man who said it had its merits.”

“Not necessarily,” Marryatt interjected. “What if the others had seen it too?”

“Morgan was tone deaf,” Prudence said. “He wouldn’t go to opera.”

“I don’t think Harry liked opera. But he couldn’t have gone anyway. He was in Australia when it was put on. I know he only came back four months ago. So—” She looked at Moira and checked herself quickly. “I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” she said in a stricken voice.

Moira stood up. “Yes, Joe and I saw it together,” she said. “Only he could have discussed it with Maurice. You’re right, all of you. You’ve proved what you set out to prove. Joe is dead. It makes no difference to me,” she said in a shuddering voice. “I knew it. He’d never hide himself from me.” Her expensive pink-and-white complexion remained inexorably pink-and-white. She walked to the door, holding her hands a little before her, as though she was groping her way through the darkness.

Hester ran forward and touched her gently on the arm.

“Moira, shall I go home with you?”

Moira looked rigidly ahead. “Why should you? We never liked each other. You’ve been trying to arrive at the truth: that’s part of it.”

Marryatt stood up. “If you’ve a car outside, I’ll drive you home,” he said impersonally. “Otherwise, we’ll walk. Have you a car here?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then.”

When they had left the room Hester sat, holding on to the sides of the chair as though she was afraid of being thrown out of it.

“Please, Miss Wade…” she heard the inspector say, and from far away her father’s voice interrupted: “Let her alone. Don’t speak to her now. I insist…”

Her head was churning into a wild clarity. She tried to think of Uncle Joe, but all she saw was Harry, standing by the door, asking her to marry him, then, not waiting for an answer, running to get in the Fergusons’ car. He could have come back; instead he had remained with them for hours, cards in his hand and money on the table; innocently cunning as he always was when he gambled; reckless, gay, oblivious of her existence. That was Harry; then, now, and for ever.

“He’s dead,” she said weakly, struggling back into consciousness of the room, as though she was coming out of an anaesthetic. Inspector Lewis made preparatory noises with his throat. “Are you feeling all right, Miss Wade?”

“Yes.” She had to be all right, she had to be excessively normal; humiliation is an emotion that demands its own interment.

“Astrology isn’t one of my subjects. I didn’t see…”

“Nadir,” she said. “That was the astrological term your witness couldn’t remember. At least it means something in astronomy, so I suppose it does in astrology. It’s the opposite to the zenith, I think. It also means a time of depression, like this, I suppose,” she said sadly. “Nadir is the name of the hero in The Pearl-Fishers, but he escaped.”